The Last Word

By Freddie Hore | Posted: Wednesday October 23, 2024

What is the purpose of life? Perhaps for you, it's achieving your biggest goal, becoming rich, visiting every country in the world, or making core memories.

But first of all, we need to work out how to achieve this purpose, through life satisfaction. 

I chose today to talk about discipline, a word that often sounds scary, misconstrued, and vague. Discipline is a skill or passion; it's the skill of becoming good at something. Discipline is training your brain to put in the mahi, work hard and persevering to achieve our biggest goals.

Another form is self-discipline. Self-discipline is knowing your limits. In life we all make mistakes, but we can avoid most of them by always choosing what we must know is best for us. If you make consistently poor decisions, you have little self-discipline.

A key part of good discipline is having a good work-life balance. Knuckle down when you’re working or studying, then make the most of your personal time, and do something pro-active. Be it creating memories, learning a skill, or developing a passion, just make it matter. The most important part of working hard is looking after yourself. 

But being well disciplined is a hard skill to master. Discipline is one of those skills where every little bit of forcing yourself to work harder, counts, no matter how big or small. Everyone has good and bad days, but it’s always possible to be that 1% better. Developing discipline early will always pay dividends later in life.

It's so much easier to work hard if you’re working on something you’re actually interested in. This is where I want to talk about finding your passion. For me, my biggest passion is anything to do with travel, languages and aviation. This led to my straightforward choice to study International Business at uni next year. 

You see, this decision was pretty easy for me, but for most of my mates, choosing what to study was definitely not. This is just an example and opinion, but it worries me how nearly half of my mates going to university are all choosing first-year health science next year. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great route to take, but I have noticed some of them have chosen this because they haven’t found their passion, have no clear vision, or are simply following the crowd. Finding your passion, discipline, or what makes you click, will make life so much easier later on. You sometimes need to work against the crowd to get yourself to a better place - trust your gut.

While my career hasn’t even unfolded yet, one thing I do know is that I am much more disciplined than I would be without a passion. Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life - something I already feel today.

It’s already week 2 of term 4, so one of the biggest opportunities to improve your discipline of the year has arrived. Exams will be so much easier if you focus on locking in for study, with an every little bit counts attitude. Time is money, so use it efficiently.

In the long run, if you have a goal, and achieve it, you will master discipline.

Now, before I go, I think it has long been far too cliché to use ‘in true fashion I will be ending on a quote’, so instead I’ll end on an Otago Boys' memoir. Learn to make your bed, make it every day. You’ll conquer the world.

It is through good discipline we will gain life satisfaction, thus we will discover and fulfil our ultimate purpose in life.